11th ACM SIGPLAN Scala SymposiumScala 2020

Welcome to the ACM SIGPLAN Scala Symposium, 2020!

Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages.

The Scala Symposium is the leading forum for researchers and practitioners related to the Scala programming language. We welcome a broad spectrum of research topics and support many submission formats for industry and academia alike.

Follow @scala_symposium on Twitter for updates.

Talks and Papers

Call for Papers

Topics of Interest

We seek submissions on all topics related to Scala, including (but not limited to):

• Language design and implementation – language extensions, optimization, and performance evaluation.
• Library design and implementation patterns for extending Scala – stand-alone Scala libraries, embedded domain-specific languages, combining language features, generic and meta-programming.
• Formal techniques for Scala-like programs – formalizations of the language, type system, and semantics, formalizing proposed language extensions and variants, dependent object types, type and effect systems.
• Concurrent and distributed programming – libraries, frameworks, language extensions, programming models, performance evaluation, experimental results.
• Big data and machine learning libraries and applications using the Scala programming language.
• Safety and reliability – pluggable type systems, contracts, static analysis and verification, runtime monitoring.
• Interoperability with other languages and runtimes, such as JavaScript, Java 8 (lambdas), Graal and others.
• Tools – development environments, debuggers, refactoring tools, testing frameworks.
• Case studies, experience reports, and pearls.

Do not hesitate to contact the Program Chair (namin@seas.harvard.edu) if you are unsure whether a particular topic falls within the scope of Scala 2020.

Important dates

Paper submission: April 7, 2020 (April 21, 2020)

Paper notification: May 22, 2020

Talk submission: May 29, 2020

Talk notification: June 12, 2020

Camera ready: June 5, 2020 (October 15, 2020)

Scala Symposium 2020: November 18th, 2020

Submission Format

To accommodate the needs of researchers and practitioners, as well as beginners and experts alike, we seek several kinds of submissions.

• Full papers (at most 10 pages, excluding bibliography)
• Short papers (at most 4 pages, excluding bibliography)
• Tool papers (at most 4 pages, excluding bibliography)
• Student talks (short abstract only, in plain text)
• Open-source talks (short abstract only, in plain text)
• Extended abstracts (at most 1 page, excluding bibliography)

The Scala Symposium uses a lightweight double-blind reviewing process, so we ask that research papers, both full and short, be anonymized. Tools papers and talks proposals need not be anonymized. Authors should omit their names from their submissions, and should avoid revealing their identity through citation.

Accepted papers (full, short, tool papers, but not talks) will be published in the ACM Digital Library. Submissions should be in acmart/sigplan style, 10pt font. Formatting requirements are detailed on the SIGPLAN Author Information page.

Submissions must conform to the ACM Policy on Prior Publication and Simultaneous Submissions and to the SIGPLAN Republication Policy.

Please note that at least one author of each accepted contribution must attend the symposium and present the work. In the case of tool demonstration papers, a live demonstration of the described tool is expected.

The submission will be managed through HotCRP: https://scala20.hotcrp.com/

Detailed information for each kind of submission is given below. For questions and additional clarifications, please contact the conference organizers.

Full and Short Papers

Full and short papers should describe novel ideas, experimental results, or projects related to the Scala language. In order to encourage lively discussion, submitted papers may describe work in progress. Additionally, short papers may present problems and raise research questions interesting for the Scala language community. All papers will be judged on a combination of correctness, significance, novelty, clarity, and interest to the community.

In general, papers should explain their original contributions, identifying what has been accomplished, explaining why it is significant, and relating it to previous work (also for other languages where appropriate).

Tool Papers

Tool papers need not necessarily report original research results; they may describe a tool of interest, report practical experience that will be useful to others, new Scala idioms, or programming pearls. In all cases, such a paper must make a contribution which is of interest to the Scala community, or from which other members of the Scala community can benefit.

Where appropriate, authors are encouraged to include a link to the tool’s website. For inspiration, you might consider advice in https://conf.researchr.org/track/POPL-2016/pepm-2016-main#Tool-Paper-Advice, which we however treat as non-binding. In case of doubts, please contact the program chair.

Student Talks

In addition to regular papers and tool demos, we also solicit short student talks by bachelor/master/PhD students. A student talk is not accompanied by paper (it is sufficient to submit a short abstract of the talk in plain text). Student talks are about 15 minutes long, presenting ongoing or completed research related to Scala. In previous years, each student with an accepted student talk received a grant (donated by our sponsors) covering registration and/or travel costs.

Open-Source Talks

We will also accept a limited number of short talks about open-source projects using Scala presented by contributors. An open-source talk is not accompanied by a paper (it is sufficient to submit a short abstract of the talk in plain text). Open-source talks are about 15 minutes long and should be about topics relevant to the symposium. They may, for instance, present or announce an open-source project that would be of interest to the Scala community.